


Definitions of Victory

by lyricwritesprose



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-09
Updated: 2017-06-09
Packaged: 2018-11-12 01:59:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11151819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lyricwritesprose/pseuds/lyricwritesprose
Summary: River has a hard time with losing.  The Doctor has his own issues about winning.  But he also has a lot of experience in changing the game.





	Definitions of Victory

**Author's Note:**

> Brit-picking, as usual, by Persiflage, who is both excellent and very efficient.

There was a gentle nudge at the back of my mind, and then a worried gray _?????_ feeling. Translation: _are you okay?_

"I'm fine," I said aloud. A little too loud; I dropped my voice in case there was a guard about. "I'm fine. It's just—"

_Scent of ocean. Gray fades to silver._

I decided to interpret that as _it'll be all right._ Communicating with a TARDIS involves a lot of guesswork and intuition. I leaned against her—which would have looked very odd if a guard had come along, since she was cloaked—and sighed, and rubbed my forehead.

Dammit, I hadn't _meant_ to go all Melody on him. I was trying—I really was, I was _trying_ to be better, for him as well as for me, but every once in a while, I would just—trip over something. Something as insubstantial as a sound, sometimes. And then, as my horizons slammed shut and my mouth spit out poison-sweet words that I didn't want to mean, I would understand. I would get it.

I'm abnormal. I'll never be anything else.

My cell is bare and there's not much to look at, so I couldn't make a pretense of studying something as the Doctor slipped out the TARDIS door. I looked fixedly at the cam-spot in the corner of the room (currently running a loop of me sleeping) and searched for something to say.

Only one thing came to mind. "I'm sorry."

"Absolutely not."

Instant flare of rage, hot and sharp and dangerous enough that I usually choke it down as quickly as I can. "Your loss, _sweetheart._ I did have plans for tonight, but—"

"River." And he was in front of me, taking hold of my hands. "I was objecting to the notion that you have anything to apologize for."

Oh. I swallowed. "I'd fix it," I said, "if I knew where to start."

"The chess board or your reaction?"

"Yes."

That won a quick smile from him, possibly a memory that hadn't happened for me yet. Time-scrambled relationships, for when interspecies romance isn't frustrating enough.

"I don't know where it comes from," I said. "But it goes back as far as I can remember. When I first came to Leadworth—they wanted me to socialize properly, they had me playing this game with a five-year-old girl. One of those kid games where you draw a card and it tells you to move to the next blue square or the next red one. All in the shuffle, basically—and after I'd won five rounds, they had _her_ shuffle."

"You lost," the Doctor said.

"I lost. I destroyed the board. I destroyed the cards. I broke everything I could get my hands on. I didn't injure her, but that was just because the board was made of cardboard.. To this day, I don't know why it made me so," uncontrollably, terrifyingly, "furious."

"Oh, my River." He squeezed my hand slightly. "You may not remember what the Silence did to you, but we both know what must have happened. What it must have been like. What do you think happened to you when you failed some challenge?"

I shivered slightly. "Pain." And it wasn't just a guess, it was—not a memory, not exactly, but the residue where a memory might have been.

He nodded and switched languages. _"As thou dwellest in a place without safety, all victory becomes_ val'yarra, _and all defeat, utter ruin."_

I caught my breath; Gallifreyan tends to take me that way. It's so very _packed,_ every word layered with meaning. _Thou_ was a ridiculously narrow translation of the pronoun he'd just used, meaning _you my intimate and equal whom I treasure—_ and the language is complex enough that there's another word for _you my intimate and equal whom I abhor._ (When I asked the Doctor what possible use the latter pronoun would be, he just looked ancient and said, _none. Not anymore._ It didn't occur to me until later that I could have used the word, once; planning to kill the Doctor was intimate in its own odd way. It says something a bit unsettling about the Time Lords that they thought of things like that.) The tenses and temporal indicators are bizarre and baroque from any human point of view, even for a Time Human. And—I don't know, something about the language seems more _real_ than English. As if it's related, however distantly, to the base code of the universe.

_"Thou hast not shown me_ val'yarra," I said. Not that _shown_ was a very good translation either, but English doesn't have words for psychic lessons. I could tell the word was _related_ to victory—in Gallifreyan, it was only one phoneme off—but it was utterly unfamiliar to me.

"Yes, well—" He switched back to English and looked away from me. "It's not a word I care for. It's—" He let go of my hands so that he could wave his in the air, feeling for the right words. "It's closer to _conquest_ than _victory,_ but that's not right either. It's the sort of victory where someone or something is broken, never to recover. Merciless, absolute. You can't have a valeyard without someone hurting, badly."

"The sort of winning that requires a victim."

"Exactly. Be very, very careful how you define victory, River. Sometimes, it—" He looked haunted. "It isn't good at all."

I nodded, thinking. I had overreacted—both tonight, when I had destroyed the chess set, and in my childhood, breaking the Candyland board over Marcie's head. But the Silence, in shaping me as a weapon, had—inadvertently?—taught me that losing was the _exact same thing_ as pain. For every victor, a victim. Not winning at Candyland had felt like an attack, and I had reacted just like any wild animal: with enough violence that Marcie would never "attack" me again.

"That tells me what's wrong with me," I said, and it came out sounding just a touch more bitter than I'd meant. "Not how to fix it. Although I suppose not hitting _you_ with the chess board counts as progress, of a sort—" Especially since it was a wooden chess board, with the white squares made of inlaid shell and the black squares, I strongly suspected, actual ebony. Beautiful. Probably priceless, like quite a lot of the random objects the Doctor has picked up over the years. Heavy.

The Doctor put his hand on my cheek, making me look at him. "There is," he said, "nothing. Wrong with you."

He really, truly believes that. I think it's one of the reasons that I love him.

And then he blinked, the look of an idea popping into existence, and smiled. "Although," he said, in a very different tone of voice, "if you want to change your reaction to games—"

I'd only agreed to play chess because I knew the Doctor loved it. "Of course I do." How could I not?

The smile broadened. "We could raise the stakes."

"How would that help?" The whole problem was that the Silence had made the stakes too high, the penalties too harsh.

"What if," the Doctor said, "for every piece taken, we agreed to pay a forfeit?"

"Again, how would that—" And then my brain caught up, and I stepped closer to him. "A jacket," I said. "A sock, a—" I unfastened it, "bowtie, something clothing-related—that sort of forfeit?" I grinned. "That sounds more like something I might suggest. I think I'm a bad influence on you, love."

"You," the Doctor said, "are a professional bad influence."

"Mm, and you _love_ it."

He chuckled, then sobered. "I suggested it," he said, "because it strikes me as exactly the sort of thing you'd come up with if you were trying to convince me that every now and then, losing can be excellent." He brushed my hair lightly back from my face. "I warn you, if we do this, I will play to win. In the interest of a proper, scientific," he tapped my nose playfully, "demonstration."

I made a slightly predatory sound in my throat. "Oh, sweetie. So will I."

For a certain definition of winning.


End file.
